Help! Can't log in any more
Last night I was working on my Sarge system, running a self-compiled version
of KDE 3.3, when suddenly I couldn't execute any commands or do anything at
all under my user login. I was able to switch to a console and log in as
root, where things worked normally. But I couldn't 'su' to my user login. I
even rebooted the system, but that didn't help.
Before this happened, I had done my regular 'apt-get dist-upgrade' which I
think installed just one updated package. But that was an hour or more
before the fault occurred.
I had also built some new KDE 3.4 packages from source and installed them as
debian packages using checkinstall (into /opt/kde3.4, separate from my KDE
3.3 installation, and using package names which include '34' to prevent them
interacting with the KDE 3.3 packages). Again, the timing of the fault
didn't seem to tally exactly with installing these packages. (The packages
which I installed yesterday were kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, etc., which I
wouldn't expect to cause problems - I built and installed kdelibs and
kdebase several days ago.)
The symptoms are:
1) kdm still displays the login screen, but login fails after I try to log
in under my user account. There are messages in the log files about missing
permissions on /tmp, /home/david, etc. I checked /tmp's permissions, and
they are still read-write-execute for everybody.
2) There is adequate space left on all disc partitions.
3) While logged on as root in a console, when I do an 'su david', it gives
an error message "No shell" (I can't remember the exact wording), and fails
to log me on.
4) When I do an 'su - david', I get error messages about not being able to
cd to /home/david. Again the login fails. /home/david still exists, and has
owner 'david'.
5) /etc/passwd still appears to have a correct entry for my user login, with
/bin/bash listed as the shell.
6) I don't have any other user accounts set up on the system, so I haven't
tried logging in under other users.
Overall, the impression is that my user account has lost all permissions and
privileges. Can anybody give me any pointers as to where to look to find out
what has gone wrong?
Cheers,
David.
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